On April 9, 2012, Microsoft decided to buy AOL’s 800 technology patents for at least $1 billion. For a price of $1.3 million per patent, Microsoft’s keen interest on AOL’s intangible property is understandable because patents do play a great part in legal and business strategies especially now that the competition is getting steeper among major technology entities of the world. The said patents can be used for tablet computers or smart phones therefore they are feared weapons and important assets of every technology company.http://cloudtimes.org/aol-patents-why-microsoft-is-interested/

The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of OpenNebula 3.4 (Wild Duck). OpenNebula 3.4 is the most feature-rich open-source alternative to VMware datacenter and cloud suite, delivering enterprise-class functionality, stability and scalability with broader platform support and integration capabilities for KVM, Xen and VMware hypervisors. The software brings countless valuable contributions by many members of our community, and specially from Research in Motion, Logica, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, and Vilnius University.http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2239409

10/04/2012

Bridging the DevOps Divide by Leveraging Cloud Technologies

In today’s increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, business leaders are seeking ways to leverage strategies that optimize growth, improve agility, driver higher-value customer relationships and lead to increased revenue. Many see cloud as the answer. In fact, a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 90 percent of organizations expect to adopt or substantially deploy a cloud model in the next three years. While cloud adoption is becoming more mainstream, organizations are also now moving beyond virtualization to higher value stages of cloud computing.http://cloudtimes.org/bridging-the-devops-divide-by-leveraging-cloud-technologies/

On the development front, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 seem to be joined at the hip.In the April 5 post, Microsoft execs reiterated that “today’s Windows Phone applications and games will run on the next major version of Windows Phone.” Will any reworking be required? The post doesn’t get into particulars, beyond saying “much of your code will be transferrable.http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-phone-8-whats-microsofts-developer-story/12353

Cloud computing weekly news summary

This week on the development front, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 seem to be joined at the hip. In other words, Windows Phone is going the way of Windows 8 on the developer side of the house. As is the case with Windows 8 Metro environment, XAML will be supported. While closely related, XAML is not Silverlight, as Silverlight developers working on Windows 8 apps have discovered.

The next thing about Microsoft, it has found itself a big market for cloud services in India’s national government. Starting this year, the Indian government will deploy Microsoft Software-as-a-Service solutions to about 7.5 million users in the education market.

Microsoft decided to buy AOL’s 800 technology patents for at least $1 billion. For a price of $1.3 million per patent, Microsoft’s keen interest on AOL’s intangible property is understandable because patents do play a great part in legal and business strategies especially now that the competition is getting steeper among major technology entities of the world. The said patents can be used for tablet computers or smart phones therefore they are feared weapons and important assets of every technology company. As Many Organizations have been talking about “effective governance” for years in relation to large-scale systems, but the emergence of governance in the SharePoint world is relatively recent and still fairly immature.

Amazon Web Service (AWS) to its side it also has released its cloud search offering, Cloud Search, which has been rumored for months. The new service is based on the same technology that powers product searches on Amazon.com. Amazon is the first company to offer search-as-a-service, but something tells us the Internet giant’s competitors will soon be scrambling to keep up now that Amazon has entered the market.

As main new feature in CloudComputing, OpenNebula 3.4 incorporates support for multiple Datastores that provides extreme flexibility in planning the storage backend and important performance benefits, such as balancing I/O operations, defining different SLA policies and features for different VM types or users, or easily scaling the cloud storage. Additionally, OpenNebula 3.4 also features improvements in other areas like support for clusters.

A year ago, VMware officially launched its open source CloudFoundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project. VMware officially announced how they are opening up the platform even further in an effort to dominate the open source PaaS landscape. Linux is a great operating system that provides a degree of application portability across multiple types of hardware architectures. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the new hardware platform in Herrod’s view with multiple approaches. The idea behind the CloudFoundry PaaS is to enable a portability or abstraction layer that allows developers to leverage the power of IaaS, without worrying about the underlying differences across different IaaS platforms.